Yes, totally agree, except for spam nodes and underinformed nodes of course. They shouldn't have too much of a say. You need to be able to devote resources in order to have a large sway on things.

Although my method is individual choice of filters and of OP_RETURN pricing per node for their mempool policy through Knots, I suspect there is a better solution, one that aligns miners with noderunners and disregards spam. Not sure what form it would take. Perhaps we don't realize that that mechanism already exists, or that we could make use of something that's being underutilized.

Being your own miner is something. There's the transaction fees we pay to miners to mine legit stuff. There's the higher fees we make spammers pay with our filters. A large portion of miners making private payment rails might not be all bad too... they'd still be interested in finding new transactions to mine, which they would continue to source from the P2P network (as shitty and quasi-permissioned as this would be, it would never completely censor anyone unless I made a mistake in my logic). We could perhaps require arbitrary data to also burn some bitcoin into provably unspendable UTXOs, which subsidizes all bitcoin holders and thus pays economic noderunners directly.